Laura Restrepo: The Dark Bride

“A good, cold beer,” he asked in a man’s voice, as he heard the first howl come from the house across the street.

Inside, the madrina was trying to get into the girl’s hair strand by strand with an orthopedic comb with very close teeth, in order to eradicate any trace of knots or critters, and with each pull the girl shrieked, tried to bite the señora and wriggled away to take refuge under some piece of furniture. The madrina drove her back out with swats of a broom, grabbed her by the collar, and subjected her again to the torture until the girl bit her again and the struggle recommenced. When Sacramento and the owner of the bar decided to enter Todos los Santos’s house, they found both women staring at the ceiling, vanquished and exhausted, and reigning over them, unconquered like a corsair’s flag, the black mane still filled with its crop of lice.

“Sacramento had a cruel childhood and Olguita believes for that reason one must try to understand him,” Todos los Santos tells me, “but I say to her that she’d better not come to me with speeches about psychology, because lots of people have come around here lately to see if I have been traumatized by this prostitution business, and I’ve sent them all packing. Blessed Sacramento, I say to Olga, he had a difficult childhood, but the rest of us didn’t have one or even know what it was.”

One afternoon when he isn’t present, the madrina tells me that Sacramento was born one day to a girl in the neighborhood who left him in the care of some friends while she traveled to the coast to settle accounts with the man who had deserted her. Since she never came back, the infant was raised from house to house and from one woman’s arms to another’s, like so many other children that belong to everyone and to no one, until the Franciscan monks arrived in Tora to evangelize. They opened the only school in the barrio and accepted him as an errand boy and kitchen helper and gave him a scholarship.

“This was a land where the normal thing was to be a puta, and to be an hijo de puta —the son of a puta —was the logical and painless consequence,” Todos los Santos informs me. “Sacramento would have grown up as sad or as happy as anyone else if the monks hadn’t taken it upon themselves to convince him of his shame.”

“To remind him of his origins they goaded him, calling him hijo de La Catunga or hijo de los callejones, son of the alleys, and when he turned seven years old they christened him with the name Sacramento,” adds Olga.

Sacramento was the name they gave all the bastard children, dousing them with baptismal water and condemning them to that distinction, which couldn’t be erased because it had been inflicted in a solemn blessing. The illegitimacy remained stamped on their birth certificates, on their cédulas de ciudadania —the official government-issued identity cards — and on their military cards, but people arranged to ignore these and various other punishing scars. According to Christian tradition, the priests baptized any child with a string of three or more names and they did the same with the bastards — Juan Domingo Sacramento, Sacramento Luis del Carmen, and Evelio del Santo Sacramento — and that made it easier for others, out of compassion, to remove the punitive moniker and to call them just Domingo, Luis del Carmen, Evelio, and so on. But this Sacramento, the cart man, ended up with the hard luck of being given only that name, or if it was accompanied by others, they were no longer remembered, and because of that he was the only hijo de La Catunga whom the entire barrio called by that name, Sacramento, which was the same as calling him hijo de La Catunga, or hijo de los callejones .

As if that punishment weren’t enough, the Franciscans filled his soul with a horror of the sins of the flesh and with a visceral mistrust of women, above all of his puta of a mother, who had abandoned him to chase after her instincts, like a lowly animal. Some time later the monks left Tora, and Sacramento, who ended up in the streets, had to accept the coarse and spontaneous tenderness with which the women of La Catunga offered him a bowl of soup, cured a wound with gentian violet or a sore throat with methylene blue, let him sleep at the foot of their beds, taught him sad love songs, and terrorized him with ghost stories. They did the same, out of maternal instinct, generous and indiscriminate, for all of the many boys and girls who roamed the barrio in need of affection and were unsure of their parentage. And so the boy grew up with twisted thoughts, troubled about work, tortured, loving what he hated and hating what he loved, always finding a spur for the turmoil boiling in his head, where adoration and gratitude toward the women was mixed with a painful rancor for their many sins and deep down a chronic incapacity to forgive them.

I asked Sacramento if by chance he remembered what had happened to the infamous coins. Of course he remembered; the most minute, decisive details are the last things lost by our memory.

“The first one was swallowed by the earth,” he told me.

“That I already know.”

“With the second and third I paid for the beer I never drank, because the shouting made me return to Todos los Santos’s house. I put the other four in my pocket, but the girl looked so humbled, so gentle in that shirt that looked like a straitjacket, that I thought it was only fair to give her at least half of what was left of the profit, so I gave her two coins, which she accepted without question. I kept the last two, which got mixed up with others that a man gave me that same afternoon for moving some things, a little extra work that came to me.”

Then I asked Sacramento if he had ever gone back to look for the buried coin. He laughed with surprise and said it had never even occurred to him, but he was piqued by the idea and twenty minutes later we were in front of a storehouse that had been built on the lot that had belonged to Todos los Santos. An entire lifetime had passed from the day when Sacramento’s minuscule treasure had been buried, and although the houses and people had changed, the street was still the same: a narrow passageway with no sewer or pavement. With a garden trowel, we began to scrape around the spot where he calculated the door had been. We removed dirt in no particular hurry, he for a while and then I, conversing in the meantime, very conscious that we were wasting our time. Several bottle caps turned up, and a rusted nut, a casing that looked like it was from a bullet, pieces of glass and rubber, and some other foolishness. And then, suddenly, a ten-centavo coin appeared, one of the ones with an Indian head that had stopped circulating a long time ago.

From that moment on Sacramento looked at me differently. In his eyes appeared a hint of perplexity and suspicion that I think made the existence of this book possible, because from then on he didn’t dare keep any secrets from me, as if I were a sibyl and knew everything before he told me. Of course, I didn’t want to take advantage of the situation to pry information from him, so I told him not to give too much importance to what had happened, that we had just found an old coin and it probably wasn’t his. He didn’t look at me with disappointment, as I had expected, but with incredulity and something close to anger.

“This is my coin,” he assured me. “I would recognize it anywhere.”

Faced with his emphatic tone, I had to admit my flippancy and ask for forgiveness. Then I tried to explain that I had invited him to look for the coin because those of us who make a living by writing live for the hunt of minute coincidences and subtle proofs that reassure us that what we write is, if not necessary, at least useful. Because it responds to currents that flow beneath what is ordinarily apparent, currents that turn back upon themselves and twist fate in circles. I also told him that a blind poet named Jorge Luis Borges believed that every casual meeting is an appointment. The more I talked, the more I got tangled up and the more magical my words seemed, and he listened to them, hypnotized, as if they were being spoken in some archaic tongue. Afterward, with the passing days and interminable conversations, during which he told me his whole life story, and I, something of mine, a sort of serene confidence developed between us that dispelled the magic in favor of friendship. But there was something that Sacramento never lost after that episode: the conviction that literature is a means for conjuring and that it can reveal secret clues. He, who had been anything but a reader, began to become interested in books.